Bento Labs Raises $2 Million to Personalize Your Phone

What if you could use mobile apps without having to download them, configure them or constantly input data such as your location?

San Francisco startup Bento Labs is developing a customizable home screen for Android devices that it says will do just that.

The company has raised $2 million in seed funding from investors that include First Round Capital, Google Ventures and Social+Capital to finance the effort. In the process it hopes to give app developers a way to reach more users and handset makers a way to personalize their devices.

The company’s main product, called Bento, is what is known as an Android “launcher,” a type of app that allows users to customize the home screen of their Android device. Bento is a special type of launcher that learns what people do on their phones and captures personal information about them in order to make apps on the home screen do useful things for them.

“We’re still far from a world where our phones are truly personal computers,” the company wrote in a blog post Wednesday announcing an invite-only beta test of its product. The “phone doesn’t remember basic information like locations that are important to me — I have to re-enter them every time I need to get a cab or find a restaurant.”

For instance, after entering your home and work address one time, the Bento launcher plugs that data into a range of apps such as Uber and Yelp so that it can automatically show estimated fares for a ride to work each morning or recommend restaurants nearby your office. With a back-end plug-in to apps like Pandora Radio, Bento can also learn a user’s musical tastes so that it can automatically customize other music apps like Spotify or queue up YouTube videos of the user’s favorite artist.

With users’ permission, the app will also learn about them by plugging into their calendar, email and Web history.

The idea is akin to Google Now, an app created by the search giant to anticipate information users might want before they search for it.

Handset makers have offered ways to customize the layout of their devices, including Samsung TouchWiz and HTC Sense, but Bento goes further by changing not just where apps appear but how they interact with users.

Lately there is more pressure on Android device makers to differentiate their products as heavy price competition has decimated profits. Though Android had 81% share of smartphone shipments in 2014 to the iPhone’s 15% share, Apple took home 90% of the profits from selling those devices, estimates research firm Strategy Analytics.

Bento Labs has yet to work out any deals with handset makers to distribute its app. It is hoping word-of-mouth will help give the app momentum and that it can strike distribution deals later.

Besides Yelp and Uber, Bento Labs is working with SoundCloud, YouTube, Reddit and a handful of others at launch.